An Open Letter to Mapzen's CEO

Hey Randy,

While I agree with the sentiment of
what you’ve written
to the new owners of HERE, I can’t help feeling there’s a distinctly anti-OSM
vibe from this piece. It seems like you’re suggesting that HERE’s data might be
opened up to external contribution (“It would certainly reduce your ongoing data
collection costs”) as a competitor to OSM, which would only serve to fracture
the open data community.

There’s already several other projects in the global, open geographic data
space; Natural Earth,
openaddresses, etc… which receive attention from
the global open data community, which arguably compete with OSM. Competition is,
generally, good and healthy and increases diversity.

However, it seems to me that the point of the “open data revolution”, and what
we should be pushing for, is the opening up of a high quality, global geographic
dataset and the growing irrelevance and devaluation of proprietary geographic
data. What I think we need to be very careful of is what traditionally happens
to the political Left; that despite lip service to “solidarity”, they expend
their effort fighting amongst themselves
(as parodied by Monty Python’s
Judean People’s Front sketch)
and concentrating on the small differences between them rather than the large
one separating them from the Right. One day, soon, when “open” has won, we can
afford to split our communities and duplicate our efforts. Until then, all the
time we’re advocating a plurality of projects, we’re helping proprietary data
last a little bit longer.

Regardless of whether they actually would open up the data, and we’ve no
reason to believe that they could or will, it sounded like you were advocating
for the first true “competitor” to OSM. Which, at this stage, would only help
Google / TomTom. You’re right, it’ll happen eventually, but I had hoped that
Google, Apple, MQ, etc… would be using and contributing open data before then.